William Langland’s allegorical poem The Vision of Piers the Plowman. (Genre, allegorical vision, personification).
The English poet, William Langland (c.1332-c.1400), was probably born at Ledbury in Herefordshire. His famous Vision Concerning Piers Plowman exhibits a moral earnestness and energy which is brightened by his vivid glimpses of the lives of the poorest classes of 14th century England.
Piers Plowman is an allegorical moral and social satire, written as a "vision" of the common medieval type. The poet falls asleep in the Malvern Hills and dreams that in a wilderness he comes upon the tower of Truth (God) set on a hill, with the dungeon of Wrong (the Devil) in the deep valley below, and a "fair field full of folk" (the world of living men) between them. He describes satirically all the different classes of people he sees there; then a lady named Holy Church rebukes him for sleeping and explains the meaning of all he sees. Further characters (Conscience, Liar, Reason and so on) enter the action; Conscience finally persuades many of the people to turn away from the Seven Deadly Sins and go in search of St. Truth, but they need a guide. Piers (Peter), a simple Plowman, appears and says that because of his common sense and clean conscience he knows the way and will show them if they help him plow his half acre. Some of the company help, but some shirk; and Piers becomes identified with Christ, trying to get men to work toward their own material relief from the current abuses of worldly power. In the last section of the poem, much less coherent than the rest, the dreamer goes on a rambling but unsuccessful summer-long quest, aided by Thought, Wit, and Study, in search of the men who are Do-Well, Do-Bet and Do-Best.
Piers Plowman marks a modification of that tradition in other directions. In the physical proximity or presence of personification figures, Langland's Will the dreamer is far from silent or mute, and he freely “mixes” with them. Piers Plowman follows the “newer” style of personification popularized by de Lorris and de Meun, and Raoul de Houdenc and Huon de Mery. (It is plausible that the intensified confusion we and Will experience trying to distinguish local personifications from authentic personified characters is a shifted manifestation of psychic distortion or reduction; the epistemological problem, noted by Griffiths as central to the poem, did have a precedent the matization in the troubadour lyrics of the twelfth century; see Zumthor 185.) Nevertheless, the poem does reveal a phenomenological correlation between the primary narratorial consciousness and the invention of personification figures. I will begin with a critique of this correlation as it operates in Piers. Afterwards, I will show that this condition is connected to a narratological description of the poem's structure, which divides, not unlike Chaucer's or Prudentius' texts, into ontologically and epistemologically distinct levels and sectors of diegesis.
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Epoch of Edwardian realists in English Literature, its idea of Liberalism and Identity.
The Edwardian period covers the time from Queen Victoria's ' death in 1901 to the beginning of World War I in 1914. It's a transitional time between the Victorian era and that begins to emerge after WWI. Writers such as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw saw the disparity between the wealthy and the poor and attacked social injustice and the selfishness of the upper classes. And why not? While the British Empire was at its height at the time, four fifths of the English population lived in squalor. Writers during this time such as Rudyard Kipling, James Barrie, Alfred Noyes, Arthur Symons, P. G. Wodehouse and others pushed back against the propriety and conservatism of the Victorian Age. In their work you'll find a distrust of authority that spanned politics, religion and art and questions conventional values. During this time a distinction was emerging between highbrow literature and popular fiction.
The Liberals returned to power in 1906 and made significant reforms. Below the upper class, the era was marked by significant shifts in politics among sections of society that had largely been excluded from power, such as common labourers, servants, the industrial working class, and the Irish. Women became increasingly aware of politics.
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